1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an assay method, and more particularly, to an assay method using an encoded particle-based platform.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Recently, techniques such as a spotting technique, a microarray technique, an electrowetting technique, an optical tweezers technique and an optoelectronic tweezers technique have been developed to research movement of an infinitesimal amount of analyte. However, in spite of the advent of these techniques, pipetting is continuously being used as an important means for analysis. Among current pipetting techniques, robotic pipetting and spotting have been improved to enable high throughput screening (HTS), thereby solving a time consumption problem of existing manual pipetting. However, HTS handling may be limited to a use for a large amount of analyte in which expensive equipment having a high user operating cost is used.
FIG. 1 schematically illustrates an existing drug assay method using pipetting. (a) of FIG. 1 shows a library containing different drugs. (b) of FIG. 1 shows a plate having a plurality of wells to which different drugs can be distributed. Referring to (a) and (b) of FIG. 1, different drugs 110 may be distributed from the library 100 including the drugs 110 to wells 130 of a plate 120 in sequence using a pipet 120. Thereafter, the drugs 110 distributed to the wells 130 of the plate 120 react with cells, which are separately provided assay targets.
A process of distributing the drugs 110 from the library 100 to the wells 130 may be performed by sequentially pipetting each of the drugs 110 selected from the library 100 into the corresponding well 130 one by one. As an example, when a plurality of plates 120 having a plurality of wells 130 are provided and there are 100K different kinds of drugs 110 in the library 100, the process may be carried out by performing pipetting into 100K wells 130 100K times. At this time, the wells 130 of the plate 120 can be given addresses, and kinds of drugs 110 respectively pipetted into the wells 130 having the designated addresses may be determined. The number of pipetting operations may increase in proportion to kinds of drugs 110 contained in the library 100, and thus may be a temporal and financial burden when the process of distributing the drugs 110 to the wells 130 of the plate 120 is performed.